Posted on 03 May 2011

Monday mornings are not usually something that I welcome, but yesterday morning, I woke up to the news that Osama bin Laden is dead, courtesy of the intrepid Navy SEALS. As a fiercely proud native New Yorker forcibly transplanted to the Garden State, I had an atypical reaction to the news that the mastermind behind 9/11 is now keeping Satan company in the fiery pits of hell. (Surprise, Osama, your “seventy virgins” are wearing horns and forked tails!)

Had I still been living in the city, I would not have joined the joyous crowds cramming the streets, waving the American flag, and chanting the equivalent of the “Wicked Witch is Dead!” In truth, I found the images of those crowds disturbing, probably because with a quick substitution of flags, the likeness to anti-American demonstrations, particularly in the wake of 9/11, is all too eerie. I have no wish to mimic the cowardly psychos who use innocent women as shields, exploit children as weapons of destruction, and wage war upon the innocent.

All that I felt upon hearing of bin Laden’s demise was a sense of justice. But that didn’t last long. The moment that it faded, a healthy suspicion kicked in, along with a sense of impotence. We buried bin Laden at sea, allegedly because no nation would have him. Well, I know plenty of New Yorkers who would have loved to have him, dead or alive … preferably, alive! The other reason we buried the butcher at sea was to dispose of his body quickly, as per Islamic custom. Why did we afford such considerations to this rat bastard? What considerations did he and his twisted kamikazes afford the innocent people in the World Trade Center? The worst part about giving bin Laden honor in death is that he now sleeps with the fishes. It’s all far too expedient for me.

It’s extremely difficult, and often impossible, to retrieve a body lost or buried at sea. I would have much preferred that we’d kept the bastard’s body intact via cryogenic freeze or at least, in a large pickle vat. Ideally, I’d have wanted to have seen the rat captured alive. We could have bound him hand and foot at Ground Zero and invited New Yorkers en masse to pay him a visit … after telling them that the cops were going to turn a blind eye to whatever we decided to do him. And I would have wanted those festivities televised. A pound of flesh carried off by numerous New Yorkers — only one pound per customer! — would have been far more satisfying and apropos a ritual than dancing in the streets.

But now, like a prosecutor’s nightmare, there is no corpus against which to make a case. There is only the military’s word that DNA proves we’ve nailed the architect of 9/11. How does the recent DNA sampling prove this? Did we have previous samples of bin Laden’s DNA against which to compare it? If we’d gotten close enough to him earlier to, say, pluck a hair out of his ugly beard, then we’d have been close enough to blow him to smithereens long ago. I’m not buying the DNA story. Osama bin Laden may very well be fish food, but I think the military manufactured that DNA tale to placate suspicious minds like mine. But I’m far from placated.

And I find the timing of bin Laden’s death very interesting. Only last week, President Obama allegedly put to rest the “birther issue.” But he didn’t, really. The birth certificate he produced is far from official, and Donald Trump, the last man to stand against political correctness, will not go quietly. What better way to distract the country from thoughts of a foreign-born Muslim President than to trumpet the news that Osama bin Laden is dead … and on Obama’s watch?

I want to believe that we truly did blow the mass murderer bin Laden off the face of the earth. I want to believe that he was deeply terrified before he died. I want to believe that he suffered — but he didn’t, if the reports of the single bullet to his head were true. I want to believe that justice has triumphed. Any way you slice it, I just can’t.